Becoming Freud

Adam Phillips traces the first fifty years of Sigmund Freud's life, stopping around 1906, before the psychoanalytic movement organised itself into an institution. Rather than catalogue achievements, Phillips reads the early life against Freud's own suspicion of biography, treating a life as something continually revised rather than fixed.

Phillips argues that Freud's formation as the favoured son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants shaped the method as much as any clinical discovery. He presents psychoanalysis as a psychology of displacement and precarious belonging, worked out amid the freedoms and persecutions facing European Jewry, and reads Freud's writing on dreams, jokes, and slips as an account of how people manufacture security and then defend it. A closing thought experiment asks what the discipline might have become had Freud died before founding it.

For a clinician, the book returns attention to how a technique is built from a particular life, and to reading a patient's history as revisable material.